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:ipulse_app: After over 20 years of monitoring your Mac, iPulse has come to iOS! Keep an eye on your iPhone or iPad's CPU, memory usage, true storage size and more. iPulse for iOS uses Picture in Picture mode so it can stay out of your way while you pinpoint potential problems. 🎯

iPulse is a one-time purchase that runs on both your iPhone and iPad. Head over to the App Store to grab the tool no developer or power user should be without.

apps.apple.com/us/app/ipulse-m

App Store‎iPulse - Monitor Your Device‎iPulse has been monitoring Macs for over 20 years. Now this essential developer tool is available for the first time on iOS and iPadOS. Your processors, network, memory, and storage space are constantly monitored and can be displayed in a convenient picture in picture view. It's like your watching…
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@Iconfactory @NoahCarver I was about to ask about accessibility until I noticed who I was replying to. Have you tried this on either platform? I didn't actually know about the Mac version either. Sounds really useful.

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@simon @Iconfactory I have unfortunately not as this is as far as I know a paid app and I am currently extremely tight on cash. I boosted it partially in the hope that others who might have could chime in or that someone with more cash to throw around than I do at the current moment would feel inspired and try it. I was also considering replying to the original post asking about accessibility directly. Given who makes this app, I am cautiously optimistic.

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@NoahCarver @Iconfactory I'm pretty optimistic. I can try it.

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@simon @Iconfactory Happy trails. If you do give it a go and have a chance, do report back on how the accessibility looks. very interested in this and will jump at it once I’m not budgeting my brains out.

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@NoahCarver @Iconfactory Well, that's unfortunate. The values seem to be unreadable with VoiceOver. I think they're rendering them in some sort of video display rather than using actual controls. I'm able to turn on screen recognition and see them that way, but they don't read particularly well.

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@simon A picture-in-picture video is quite an ingenious approach to presenting live, running data even when the app is backgrounded. Just... not an accessible one. It does support audio alerts; not a replacement for VO access but could be useful maybe? @NoahCarver @Iconfactory

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@jscholes @NoahCarver @Iconfactory Agreed. And unfortunately, one instance where it would be necessary to redesign the interface to make it accessible. It's not what I'd call a cheap app; but it is a very useful-sounding one. I hope this is something they're considering.

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@simon @jscholes @NoahCarver @Iconfactory I haven't tried it personally either, but I was going to email them with some potential ideas how this could work.

One is obviously using audio, more like the charm utility that @talon made a while ago, which used a continuous sound to indicate things like CPU and memory state.

At that point, maybe the usage stats could sit on the dynamic island, and I think that is actually a place where you could have a voiceover label that would read all the information out.

Another way I thought of is if they had a shortcut that you could assign to a voiceover gesture, which as long as the app was running would also speak this information out.

I think that would probably work to make information like this voiceover accessible.

The audio alerts that are in the app could also potentially be combined with spoken alerts with text-to-speech as well. Sorry for the wall text I was dictating.

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@pitermach @simon @jscholes @NoahCarver @Iconfactory @talon We’ve thought about the accessibility issues here and it’s a hard problem.

The main issue is that we’re producing more information than can be read aloud in the one second between updates. There would be a string of information like this:

“12% performance, 34% efficiency, 56% graphics, 100 Mbps download, 200 Kbps upload, 2.2 GB memory”

That can’t be read in a single second, and even if it could, it would be overwhelming.

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@chockenberry @pitermach @simon @jscholes @NoahCarver @Iconfactory That's why I've decided to use sound in my resource monitor. For percentages scaling pitch or volume works easily enough. But for values where the upper limit is variable or even unknown I took some liberty defining values that I thought sounded good and expected to work for most things. It can use either pitch, volume or cross fade between different sounds. This is for PC so I was able to add a push to play feature which I suppose won't work well on touchscreens though. But sound I believe is an excellent way to present this information very quickly without relying on speech. Speech could be triggered manually. It can also pan the sound of each individual core from left to right so you can immediately tell which core is active and how much for example. So I would say speech isn't your only option :)

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@chockenberry @pitermach @simon @jscholes @NoahCarver @Iconfactory This also does not take into consideration other disabilities though, like deafness, which might require its own accessibility. However for sighted deaf users the visual display is fine. For deaf blind users I'm not sure how much control you get over braille output especially for something like globally reserving a few cells on the left or right for this info. So iOS might be the limiting factor.

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@talon @chockenberry @pitermach @simon @jscholes @NoahCarver @Iconfactory Updating selected cells on a braille display is very doable.

@kevinrj @chockenberry @simon @jscholes @NoahCarver @Iconfactory Technically it is, but I think what @talon was refering to were API limitations. I don't believe iOS right now lets developers send different text to a Braille Display separate from the speech, let alone do so when the app in question isn't even in the foreground.